User talk:NYScholar/Archive 5

[material relating to sources for consideration by other editors (temporarily copied from Talk:Lewis Libby) for saving here:]

Additional biographical sources pertaining to Lewis Libby
"Nick Bromell, Professor of English and Director of Graduate Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Massachusetts, is an 'old friend of Scooter Libby's' from boarding school, 'deeply opposed to the Bush administration, which [he] regards as dishonest and dangerous,' who 'believes that Scooter and his neoconservative colleagues have not only set the nation on a disasterous course, they have also destroyed my father's lifelong effort to make U.S. policy in the Middle East more responsive to the realities on the ground': 'I went away to boarding schools in the early 1960s, and at one of these [Eaglebrook] my best friend was a boy named Scooter -- Lewis 'Scooter' Libby -- who grew up to become Paul Wolfowitz's protégé, Dick Cheney's chief of staff, and one of the Bush administration's strongest advocates for the war in Iraq....'" "Another profile by Nick Bromell, 'someone who's an old friend of Scooter Libby's and at the same time a frustrated critic of the Bush administration,' who has 'known Scooter since we were both 11-year-old 'new boys' at a boarding school [Eaglebrook] in New England....Later we were roommates, co-captains of the debating team, and later still we both went to Andover. We had the same teachers, read the same books, and played hundreds of hours of touch football together. We were close friends, drawn to each other not just by shared interests but by a shared position on the cruel status ladder of these elite prep schools.  In a world dominated by rich WASP jocks, we were both too small to play varsity sports.  Scooter was a Jew.  I was a scholarship boy whose family never owned a car. [... added later] As Scooter's friend, I was always puzzled by how he managed to reconcile his exceptional intelligence with an unquestioning allegiance to these schools' absurd values and hypocritical institutions. Perhaps as a Jewish boy, Scooter simply felt more pressure than I did to submit to the system in which we were placed. [Updated. --NYScholar 11:11, 29 June 2007 (UTC)]"
 * Bromell, Nick. "Scooter Libby and Me".  The American Scholar (Phi Beta Kappa) (Winter 2007).  Accessed 25 Apr. 2007.  Online reposting. Alternet  16 Jan. 2007.  Accessed 25 Apr. 2007.
 * –––.  "Scooter's Tragic Innocence: Why My Friend Scooter Libby Is Loyal to Bush, Cheney and an Arrogant Administration Whose Values Are Not His Own". Salon 24 Jan. 2007.  Accessed 25 Apr. 2007.  (Premium content; restricted access.)  Online reposting.  Democratic Underground Discussion Forum 24 Jan. 2007.  Accessed 25 Apr. 2007.

[The above passage relates to the dispute in arbitration pertaining to Lewis Libby's ethnic and/or religious public self-identification as a Jewish person. Clearly, from the age of eleven years on, according to Bromell (his "best friend" at the time), he had identified himself publicly as being Jewish. [It is highly unlikely that his family was not "Jewish" if he himself was at age eleven.] I add the passage only because it pertains to various disputes about categories pertaining to public self-identification of religious belief that editors from time to time have been adding and deleting from this article about a public figure whose later high-level U.S. government political policy-making position involved meetings with officials of the Israeli government at the highest level. The passage is simply offered as more reliably and verifiably-sourced evidence of that public self-identification. Nowhere in his two articles does Bromell say that Libby did not identify himself publicly as being Jewish. (Though, as a public figure, "use of categories" does not pertain in the same way as it would if Libby were a "private figure," not a high-profile public official convicted of federal felonies, losing his law licenses as a result of that conviction, and being sentenced to federal prison and fined substantially.) (Bromell offers his own points of view on the biographical fact of Libby's being Jewish and, like himself but for different reasons, being a kind of social outcast in the "WASP" (Bromell's word) environment of prep school.) From Brommel's point of view (as a source) these are just biographical facts about Libby's life that later might (or might not) be relevant to understanding his role in "neoconservative" U.S.-Israeli policy-making, Middle East political affairs, his strong role in advocating the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and later strong support that he has and is still receiving from members of the Jewish community both in the U.S. and abroad, including Israel. All of this mitigates against the argument that Libby has not publicly identified himself as being Jewish (having a belief in Judaism and/or being an ethnic Jewish person). The BLP category issue pertains only to the matter of "belief" not to the matter of ethnicity: WP:BLP and WP:BLP. Whether or not the fact of Libby's being Jewish (his so-called "Jewishness" according to Kampeas and Kampeas' evidence of his Temple membership, as cited earlier) and the controversy raised about it as reported by Kampeas is relevant enough to mention in the article is still subject to discussion and debate and disputed by some editors. I simply offer the information in the passage quoted as further evidence to consider. At this point, I myself [given the arbitration matter] don't know what to do with it and would not take a chance of adding it to the article; but here the information is as quoted above and present in full in the source by Bromell cited. (Though I have listed it as "premium content" restricted to subscribers only, today I was able to access the article fully without being a subscriber by just clicking on the link. --NYScholar 11:00, 29 June 2007 (UTC)]

These are recently-published, detailed profiles by an authoritative reliable source (published originally in reliable and verifiable sources) who had been a close friend of Lewis "Scooter" Libby; they may provide additional biographical information and insights about Scooter Libby; despite their differences in political points of view, Bromell and Libby were friends at least until the writing of these essays: In the earlier one, Bromell writes: "In my hotter moments—I have fewer and fewer cool moments these days—I ask Scooter whether his political identification with homophobia is distinguishable from a political identification with racism or anti-Semitism. And convinced that it is not, I sit down at my desk to do it: to write the letter telling Scooter that I can no longer be his friend, not even in the rather distant way we have been friends for all these years.  Today, my old friend is under indictment for obstructing justice by lying about his knowledge of the Valerie Plame affair. Unless his lawyers manage to engineer a miracle, he will be tried in court early in 2007. There he will face the distinct possibility of public disgrace and a career-terminating jail sentence. So what should I hope for, I ask myself: my old friend’s acquittal or his conviction?" Bromell ends the essay saying that he hopes for his friend's acquittal for personal reasons and his conviction for political ones, it seems. He seems still in a quandary, torn between his own political views and his personal feelings for Scooter his boyhood friend of old and longstanding adult friend, able to "see both ways at once" (11). --NYScholar 23:08, 25 April 2007 (UTC)


 * "Antiwar Radio: Charles Goyette Interviews Nick Bromell", KFNX AM 1100 (Phoenix, Arizona), accessible in MP3 format, relates to the article in The American Scholar and was broadcast on 26 Jan. 2007.
 * It is interesting, I think, to listen to, as Bromell elaborates some of his points in the article published in TAS. Re: Libby's full given name: Asked by Charles Goyette what the "I." in I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby stands for, first Bromell says "Irv[e]" and then "Irving," so that is still in limbo; given his answer, it would seem that "Irve" or "Irv" is the nickname for the fuller given name "Irving," however; when asked if Libby's last name was always "Libby," Bromell says that that is the only last name that he knew him by (since they were 11 years old).  As Bromell is an English professor as well as an old friend of Libby's, they also discuss Libby's novel The Apprentice, with some biographical focus.  --NYScholar 00:35, 26 April 2007 (UTC)

Like many other sites, the antiwar.com notice of the interview also links to the profile of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby at Right Web: Exposing the architecture of power that's changing our world:
 * "Profile: I. Lewis 'Scooter' Libby". Right Web, International Relations Center (IRC).  Last updated 21 Mar. 2007.  Accessed 25 Apr. 2007.
 * This detailed "Profile" could be added to "Related external links" in the main article: I list it for consideration, along with the previous sources on this current talk page and already listed in Talk:Lewis Libby/Archive 6. --NYScholar 01:04, 26 April 2007 (UTC)

quote request
article says Patrick Fitzgerald "noted also that he had been unable to formulate charges against anyone else in the CIA leak grand jury investigation because of the obstruction of justice by Libby."[emph mine] is sourced to 'Hardball with Chris Matthews' for March 6. i was unable to find a quote in the article clearly substantiating this statement. Doldrums 13:34, 26 April 2007 (UTC)


 * Fitzgerald's cited statement also pertains to the previous source given in the notes in the sentence right before that: MSNBC article in relation to his original news conference about Libby's indictment (Oct. 28, 2005): WaPO transcript of Fitzgerald news conference (currently n. 29 [& others] in Valerie Plame): see section of article cited at end of previous sentence:

No more charges:“The results are actually sad,” Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald said. “It’s sad that we had a situation where a high-level official person who worked in the office of the vice president obstructed justice and lied under oath. We wish that it had not happened, but it did.” Fitzgerald said the CIA leak investigation was now inactive. “I do not expect to file any additional charges,” he said. “We’re all going back to our day jobs.”

[Note well: The citation to the source is not to merely one transcript as the above comment says; it's to "video clips," which are several on the MSNBC Hardball webpage linked in the citation note. See Editing history to note. There are various video clips on the site, including video footage from Fitzgerald's comments to the media.]

The key point is that because of Libby's obstruction of justice and the lies, Fitzgerald has said, as documented in his news conference re: the indictment of Libby (in 2005), that there was a "cloud" (see next sentence; Chris Mathews' source) over the investigation, and it was not possible for investigators and the grand jury thus to identify who else [Fitzgerald] might needed to have "charged" ("additional charges"); that was Fitzgerald's original claim about the effects of the obstruction of justice in his grand jury testimony and lies in Libby's interviews with the FBI, which led to his convictions in United States v. Libby: that the investigation was "impeded" by [because of] Libby's obstruction of it [cf. active voice used by Media Matters as cited below: Libby's obstruction impeded the investigation]: Let me then ask your next question: Well, why is this a leak investigation that doesn't result in a charge? I've been trying to think about how to explain this, so let me try. I know baseball analogies are the fad these days. Let me try something. If you saw a baseball game and you saw a pitcher wind up and throw a fastball and hit a batter right smack in the head, and it really, really hurt them, you'd want to know why the pitcher did that. And you'd wonder whether or not the person just reared back and decided, "I've got bad blood with this batter. He hit two home runs off me. I'm just going to hit him in the head as hard as I can." You also might wonder whether or not the pitcher just let go of the ball or his foot slipped, and he had no idea to throw the ball anywhere near the batter's head. And there's lots of shades of gray in between. You might learn that you wanted to hit the batter in the back and it hit him in the head because he moved. You might want to throw it under his chin, but it ended up hitting him on the head. FITZGERALD: And what you'd want to do is have as much information as you could. You'd want to know: What happened in the dugout? Was this guy complaining about the person he threw at? Did he talk to anyone else? What was he thinking? How does he react? All those things you'd want to know. And then you'd make a decision as to whether this person should be banned from baseball, whether they should be suspended, whether you should do nothing at all and just say, "Hey, the person threw a bad pitch. Get over it." In this case, it's a lot more serious than baseball. And the damage wasn't to one person. It wasn't just Valerie Wilson. It was done to all of us. And as you sit back, you want to learn: Why was this information going out? Why were people taking this information about Valerie Wilson and giving it to reporters? Why did Mr. Libby say what he did? Why did he tell Judith Miller three times? Why did he tell the press secretary on Monday? Why did he tell Mr. Cooper? And was this something where he intended to cause whatever damage was caused? FITZGERALD: Or did they intend to do something else and where are the shades of gray? And what we have when someone charges obstruction of justice, the umpire gets sand thrown in his eyes. He's trying to figure what happened and somebody blocked their view. As you sit here now, if you're asking me what his motives were, I can't tell you; we haven't charged it. So what you were saying is the harm in an obstruction investigation is it prevents us from making the fine judgments we want to make. I also want to take away from the notion that somehow we should take an obstruction charge less seriously than a leak charge. This is a very serious matter and compromising national security information is a very serious matter. But the need to get to the bottom of what happened and whether national security was compromised by inadvertence, by recklessness, by maliciousness is extremely important. We need to know the truth. And anyone who would go into a grand jury and lie, obstruct and impede the investigation has committed a serious crime.

Please see the citations to Fitzgerald's post-conviction comments to the media (in various articles cited) [here's another source for the video of the remarks--WMV at crooks and liars which could be an additional source given] and click also on the video link to the Chris Mathews program: Hardball video: "The Cloud Over Dick Cheney"; there are other links provided in the webpage for the Hardball (printed) source citation, where that link is also listed. [An article by Neil Lewis quoting Fitzgerald's comments to the press was published by the New York Times on March 7, 2007: "THE LIBBY VERDICT; Libby, Ex-Cheney Aide, Guilty of Lying in C.I.A. Leak Case" (requires log in; possibly TimesSelect subscr.; I've read and verified this article via mine). A possible additional sentence to quote from this NYT article by Lewis is: "In remarks to reporters outside the courthouse, Mr. Fitzgerald also addressed at length the criticism of his decision to prosecute Mr. Libby on charges of lying to investigators while not charging anybody with leaking Ms. Wilson's name to reporters." See the WMV (or QuickTime) video for those remarks.]

[Perhaps after (a) subsequent editor(s) deleted that sentence, when (a) later editor(s) restored the sentence, s/he or they placed it after the note number instead of before it and perhaps it now needs an additional source. Originally, it had verified sources (deleted along with it earlier), and its original source substantiates the statement]. It also refers to his original news conference [about] the "cloud" over the CIA leak grand jury investigation cast by Libby's obstruction of justice [a key part of his closing arguments], [which] is what he said initially (using his baseball metaphor): see the longer discussion and the sources in the cross-linked articles in "See also"; espec. the Plame affair--recently renamed CIA leak scandal (2003)--(cross-linked articles there--e.g., Valerie Plame), and United States v. Libby).  When the protection is lifted, perhaps editors will try to correct any typographical errors remaining in this article and restore any additional missing sources. Thanks for your observation.  [I and others reading these comments duly note it and will rectify it when possible.]  (I may look for the exact source later, if it got deleted by accident or somehow confused throughout earlier edits.) --NYScholar 15:27, 26 April 2007 (UTC)


 * looks like OR to me. we need more than two bits of information, viz. Libby obstructed, no charges filed against anyone else, to make a statement that charges were not filed because of what Libby did. the Fitzgerald statement above too doesn't help much, it appears to be a general comment about why obstruction charges shld be taken seriously rather than saying specifically that what Libby did made filing charges impossible. i haven't looked at the videos and maybe some sources have been mistakenly deleted, but i don't think the quoted text substantiates what the article says. Doldrums 16:29, 26 April 2007 (UTC)
 * United States v. Libby relies on the same March 6 Hardball episode as source. Doldrums 16:43, 26 April 2007 (UTC)


 * Please examine the sources cited [... and] documented. You need to "look at the videos" of the cited sources before you make unfounded claims based on them. [...]The [cited] sources document Fitzgerald's statements to the media both after the verdict and in his press conference relating to the original indictments against Libby, 4 of which he was judged guilty & convicted.  The convictions mean that he [Libby] obstructed justice through false statements (lies) and perjury before the grand jury and in his testimony to the FBI.  Fitzgerald makes it crystal clear that due to Libby's false statements, perjury, and obstruction of justice, he impeded the grand jury investigation about the CIA leak.   [Those are the crimes (which all pertain to the grand jury investigation, including the FBI interviews that were part of it) for which [the jury convicted] Libby in United States v. Libby.]  --NYScholar 17:18, 26 April 2007 (UTC) [clarified in brackets; added link. --NYScholar 15:09, 27 April 2007 (UTC)]


 * If there is a mistake in someone's exact wording of a sentence citing the sources, it can be corrected later, after the protection of this article is lifted. Citing reliable sources and documenting them is not "original research."  That is an unfounded charge.  Just examine the editing history and read the citations in the notes more carefully.  If the sentence that you question needs to be somewhat reworded, it can be reworded later.  Fitzgerald clearly states that Libby "obstructed justice" and "impeded" the investigation of the grand jury. There is no "original research"; it is direct quotation from Fitzgerald's own statements.  That is what "obstruction of justice" means (as F. says).  It means that the lying impeded the investigation making it impossible to know who did what, when, and why (as the indictment states and as Fitzgerald states in his press conference about it [and in his closing arguments, also a context to which the post-verdict comments to the media relate].   --NYScholar 17:18, 26 April 2007 (UTC)
 * [I have provided some typographical corrections and updated in brackets for greater clarity. Sorry if my previous explanation was less clear than I intended.  See my most recent reply re: active voice v. passive voice and the importance of the contexts of Fitzgerald's Feb. 20, 2007 closing arguments at trial and earlier post-indictment press conference of Oct. 28, 2005 for understanding the content of his comments to the media after the verdict.  All these sources pertain to understanding what he [Fitzgerald] was referring to in referring to Libby's obstruction of justice, perjury, and false statements during the grand jury investigation, the crimes [for which (in United States v. Libby), the United States (represented by the prosecutor Fitzgerald) tried and convicted Libby....] --NYScholar 14:43, 27 April 2007 (UTC) [and further clarified in brackets, I hope.  Sorry for any previous unintended lack of clarity in these sentences. --NYScholar 14:54, 27 April 2007 (UTC)]

For further documented reliable sources, see also all the coverage in the articles listed in "Related external links": the sources are listed so that one can consult them for the news of the day: there are also video clips linked in a variety of them and other news sites, such as PBS (The News Hour with Jim Lehrer): e.g., news clips of juror Denis Collins and of Patrick Fitzgerald's and others' comments to the media are provided throughout the news sites: e.g, Denis Collins: March 6. Reading documented reliable news sources and clicking on links provided in them is not "original research"; the sources are documented: Citing sources; Attribution, etc. Scroll through them. As I've already said, I'm sure that if there are some actual mistakes in language of a sentence or in placement of a note, it can be fixed. WP:AGF. --NYScholar 17:26, 26 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Among the live-blogging accredited court press blog accounts is one filed in Firedoglake by Christy Hardin Smith on March 6th, describing Fitzgerald's remarks to the media after the verdict; the video clips of those remarks are in the MSNBC, CNN, and other media video clips: "Fitzgerald post trial press conference". The more-detailed links to reliable verifiable documented sources are also in United States v. Libby (See this article's See also sec.).  --NYScholar 17:35, 26 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Another useful reliable verifiable source re: Fitzgerald's comments to the media and other issues after the Libby (mostly) guilty verdict is Media Matters: "Libby's guilty verdict: Media myths and falsehoods to watch for", Media Matters 6 March 2007, accessed 26 April 2007. --NYScholar 17:45, 26 April 2007 (UTC):
 * "[links embedded in source] No underlying crime was committed. Since a federal grand jury indicted Libby in October 2005, numerous media figures have stated that the nature of the charges against him prove that special counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald's investigation of the CIA leak case found that no underlying crime had been committed. But this assertion ignores Fitzgerald's explanation that Libby's obstructions prevented him -- and the grand jury -- from determining whether the alleged leak violated federal law." --NYScholar 17:47, 26 April 2007 (UTC)
 * I think that the sentence may need a time-related verb tense correction with an additional repetition of the second note following the sentence that precedes it in the main text and also an additional note to Fitzgerald's remarks in his Oct. 28, 2005 news conference; I think that the original intention of this sentence was to refer back to Fitzgerald's earlier remarks (played in various video clips) for context for his March 6, 2007 media comments:
 * current sentence in article:
 * "He noted also that he had been unable to formulate charges against anyone else in the CIA leak grand jury investigation because of the obstruction of justice by Libby."
 * [possible corrected sentence] E.g.:"He noted also earlier (in his news conference announcing the indictment of Libby on 28 Oct. 2005 and in his closing arguments in United States v. Libby) that he had been unable to formulate charges against anyone else in the CIA leak grand jury investigation because of Libby's obstruction of justice."

Other related pertinent sources
[The full review from which the following passage comes is worth reading for Wheatcroft's complete point of view:] "....neoconservatism is an episode, an important and interesting one, in the intellectual and political history of Jewish America, and it is impudent to call anyone who mentions this a bigot. Schoenfeld suggests that only racist crackpots ever query the commitment of senior Washington officials, but it was Jack Straw, himself a descendant of Jewish immigrants, who said of Lewis Libby, Vice-President Dick Cheney's chief of staff: 'It's a toss-up whether Libby is working for the Israelis or the Americans on any given day....' Geoffrey Wheatcroft's book The Controversy of Zion won an American National Jewish Book Award. His latest book is The Strange Death of Tory England (Allen Lane, the Penguin Press)." --NYScholar 05:57, 7 May 2007 (UTC)
 * Geoffrey Wheatcroft. "A State Like No Other: Israel, Once Seen As a Refuge, Has Become One of the Few Places Where Jews Are Attacked Simply for Being Jews". ("Geoffrey Wheatcroft on the troubled history of a homeland.") The New Statesman.  April 25, 2005.  Accessed May 7, 2007.  Revs. of  Jacob's Gift: a journey into the heart of belonging, by Jonathan Freedland Hamish (Hamilton, 2005), 395pp, £16.99 ISBN 0241142431; The Question of Zion, by Jacqueline Rose (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 208pp, £12.95; The Return of Anti-Semitism, by Gabriel Schoenfeld (Politico's, 2005), 186pp, £14.99.

[Updated above by adding more of a quoted passage and my comments from relevant talk page in brackets. --NYScholar 11:11, 29 June 2007 (UTC)]